Michelle Alexander
Bio
Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court. Michelle Alexander has published the book The New Jim Crow, in which she argues that systemic racial discrimination in the United States has resumed following the Civil Rights Movement’s gains, implicit but legalized and of devastating social consequences, with the domestic War on Drugs and other governmental policies. She considers the scope and impact of this current law enforcement, legal and penal activity to be comparable with that of the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries.
1 submission.
Michelle Alexander Speaks at 25th Anniversary Celebration for CLAIM
by Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has worked on criminal justice reform issues. Also a legal scholar, Alexander recently published her first book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In it, she examines the intersections between racism, mass incarceration, and the War on Drugs, illustrating their devastating consequences. Megan Bernard's recent review of the book can be found on the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education Collective (P-CARE) blog. Another review, published by COLORLINES, examines how Alexander places contemporary incarceration statistics in historical perspective.